Where White Horses Gallop
by Beatrice MacNeil
Beinn Barra, in the northern highlands of Cape Breton, is as rugged as it is beautiful, as daring as it is pristine, as susceptible to war as it is to peace. It is 1939, England has declared war on Germany, Canada will march beside her. And the lives of five young friends will be changed forever.
Three of them enlist with the Cape Breton Highlanders and sail off to war in November 1941: Benny Doucet, a gifted composer and fiddle player; Calum Macpherson, who planned on studying medicine after the war; and Hector MacDonald, a fisherman who took great pride in the fact that he had not lost a pair of boots to the Atlantic since he was nine years old. But Calum's brother Hamish, handicapped and unable to serve, remains at home in Beinn Barra. And Alex Macgregor, fisherman and poet, refuses to enlist. Alex is in love with the post-mistress wit the thick ankles, and when the conscription men come for him he hides in a false wall in his mother's attic.
Where White Horses Gallop is a haunting tale of friendship and of a traumatic war where emotional bullets riddle the spirit long after the guns in the Arielli Valley and the Delfzjil trenches have grown silent.
